Hasta La Gadget!

One of Amazon’s subtler but potentially valuable promises for the Kindle Fire HD was its Kindle FreeTime mode — a fenced-off world that would give kids a simple place to play and their parents the confidence to step away for a few precious minutes. It wasn’t part of the initial launch, but a new update to the 7-inch model is rolling FreeTime into Amazon’s latest tablet. The upgrade gives as much flexibility as Amazon promised, letting adults introduce filters as well as cap the time their children spend with different kinds of content. Most of the remaining updates pertain to general fixes; that said, we imagine that most parents won’t mind the narrow focus once they know Junior can’t watch Kill Bill.

Filed under: Tablets, Amazon

Amazon Kindle Fire HD update brings Kindle FreeTime to tablet-craving tykes originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Oct 2012 01:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This week the folks at Amazon have made it clear that they continue to mean business with their line of Kindle Fire tablets, today calling the Kindle Fire HD the “#1 best-selling product across all of Amazon worldwide.” We’ve had some suspicion rise up in comments and emails regarding Amazon’s press releases regarding their own sales suggestions such as this one, so until we’re certain Amazon actually does specify that the Kindle Fire HD actually literally did sell more units than any other product on the Amazon website, we’ll keep with the quotes. The term “best-selling” could also mean “sold as many as we made” or “did just as well as we expected it to.”

With the Kindle Fire HD, Amazon notes that they retain the crown for bestselling 7-inch tablet, that term once again not specified exactly. In this case though, selling the most of a 7-inch tablet wouldn’t be out of the question for Amazon, as the Kindle Fire line has been doing extremely well over the past year. This press update notes that they plan on continuing this trend with enhancements to the Kindle Fire HD already in consumers’ hands.

Today Amazon says they’ll be pushing a new free update to the Kindle Fire HD, software that will be coming to your device over-the-air. This means it’ll show up on your tablet as a notification and you’ll only have to press “yes” to get it on the device and loaded. This update includes Kindle FreeTime, a feature made specifically for kids.

This Kindle FreeTime allows parents to select the content that a kid can see and lock the tablet with a password. This update should keep the Kindle Fire HD Amazon’s “best-selling product since launch” up until the 8.9-inch tablet is launched. The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 will be shipping on November 20th and will be starting in at $299 USD. Get ready for that one with a lovely read of our first Kindle Fire HD review right now!

Kindle Fire HD named “best-selling product” across Amazon worldwide is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This Monday it became apparent that Amazon’s cloud services were knocked out in several sectors, this resulting in downtime for major websites and environments such as Reddit, Github, Minecraft, and Flipboard. Amazon has previously had similar events to these happen to their servers, with overheating and automatic shutdowns being blamed in those cases – now we’ve not quite got an official statement from the company even after a significant chunk of the day has passed. In other words – Reddit is down, it’s not just you.

Today’s outage appears to be centered around their EC2 operations with Amazon’s status for the area currently flipped to “performance issues.” This status does not include official word from Amazon as of yet, but the cards do not lie. The EC2 status as listed by Amazon’s own Amazon Web Services status listing have gone from “degraded performance” at 10:30 AM PDT to “new launches for EBS backed instances are failing” closer to 11:30 AM PDT.

You can watch the updates yourself at Amazon’s Web Services update page while you wait for the web giants to come back – meanwhile we’ll be following along and updating you from SlashGear here as it happens as well. The current statuses surrounding North America, especially in the Eastern region of the states, let us know that Amazon is not only seeing outages in several areas, but that re-launching said services is currently a no-go.

If you have a peek at Outage Analyzer you’ll find that they’ve made it clear that Amazon’s outages have likely affected nearly 100 domains across North America up through Canada and Alaska as well as through the UK and surrounding countries. The outage remains open through the 3PM CST hour. This list of downed sites continues to grow with Airbnb, Heroku, and Netflix being added here right before this post is published – stay tuned!

UPDATE: 3:10 PM CST – Affected sites list grows – Pinterest, FastCompany, FourSquare added. Failures appear sporadic as some sites appear to be up and running intermittently while others remain down for the count.

UPDATE: 4:19 PM CST – Several sites (including Reddit) appear to be coming back up for air now here and there – of course heavy loads are expected due to the mass amounts of cat pictures that were waiting to be uploaded and viewed.

Reddit, Netflix, Flipboard taken down in Amazon cloud failure [UPDATES] is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Many of us who live in North America and Europe consider Amazon synonymous with online retail — yet we forget that the company barely even registers in some parts of the world. That misconception is about to be cleared up now that one of China’s largest online retailers, 360buy, is going global. A just-launched English version of the store is initially shipping China-made goods for free to 36 countries that include obvious candidates like Australia, Canada, the UK and the US as well as France, Germany and southeast Asia. You’re unlikely to find a Kindle Fire HD equivalent in the selection, but the mix could still make Amazon nervous when the brand-agnostic can already find real bargains. Combined with long-term plans to set up local distribution points, 360buy’s international expansion could get more of us comfortable with buying from China and heat up a retail race that some thought had already been won.

Filed under: Internet, Amazon

Chinese online retail giant 360buy spreads worldwide, may keep Amazon on its toes originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Oct 2012 14:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon purchased UK movie streaming site Lovefilm nearly two years ago and only now are the two showing some sign of integration. In order to make the app work on Kindle Fire and Kindle HD devices users have to link their Amazon and Lovefilm accounts, and from then on they can sign in with their Amazon credentials on the web or other devices. According to the FAQ posted to announce the switch, anyone that isn’t rocking a Kindle but wants to login with their Amazon info anyway will be able to eventually, just not yet. Of course, this is all just a bit premature since the Amazon tablets are still a few days away from launching in Blighty, but if you’re carrying around a US import you should see Lovefilm’s service pop up in the next week. What this means for Lovefilm as a standalone brand in the future — as the streaming wars continue to heat up — remains to be seen, but one less password to remember is a a movement we can easily get behind.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

Lovefilm to start letting users log in with their Amazon info, Kindle owners are up first originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Oct 2012 06:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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